The 2020 presidential election season has become overwhelmed by a blizzard of contradictions, of wild rumors and crazy mischief, spiced by putrid lies and fibs and sordid distortions and con jobs, not to mention the sabotaging of the voting process, an Attorney General who’s the President’s personal consigliere, and the GOP’s serious efforts to wreck the whole economy by undermining the efficiency of the U.S. mail upon which virtually every person and every business depends.
We’re experiencing the effects of a constitutional and cultural abscess that’s infecting the whole country, driving us all nuts, leaving us dizzy and disoriented and close to being just plain fed up. How can this be happening in our country? What on earth is going on? We’re all trying to figure it out, scratching our heads, desperate to make sense of this steaming pile of BS that’s fogging our rose-colored glasses and making us politically nauseous.
One answer is that Donald Trump’s presidency is a symptom of what an old friend of mine used to describe as: “It’s always darkest before the last straw.”
Our political culture has, apparently, been split almost in half since the Revolution, eventually evolving into a terrible Civil War, and then into the economic inequalities that caused the Great Depression, which saw the response of the New Deal and in turn the reaction of conservative opposition, the ghosts of which we are still living with today. Our culture’s polarized opposites gain the upper hand from time to time by attracting a small but powerful political middle ground that moves toward one or the other of the two polarized views, tipping the scales, so to speak, and moving the pendulum of power to one side or the other. This is, of course, not an original insight. Most of us get this almost instinctively the first time we pay attention to an election.
The current president represents the death throes of the “conservative” reaction and domination of our political culture since, more or less, the death of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. When a political party slips on its own banana peels of white collar criminality, political extortion and dodging and fudging on the system of which they are the elites, then you know the electoral last straw is coming like a 2 x 4 whirring from outer space.
Biden and Trump represent the polarization of our national culture’s two political world views. With his narcissistic personality and obnoxious anything-goes competitiveness, Trump happened to come along just when the Republican Party had eroded its moral vigor by spending eight years engaged in an out-and-out racist assault on President Obama, the nation’s first Black president. And now Trump himself is a Titanic sinking fast and taking with him the entire, exhausted, disgraced and shameful conservative establishment.
Biden comes into play as a genuine political master craftsman of the old school, whose eight years as vice president and decades in the Senate give him a formidable and matchless expertise. He knows how government works. Biden, however, is in the vanguard of the old liberal establishment. No one is sure how up to the moment his policies and instincts will be. He carries the banner of a political party on the ascendancy, energized with two fast-growing movements that will tip the scales and dominate American politics for decades ahead, but movements to which he only marginally belongs, though is welcoming and trying to embrace. These two new political forces are first made up of people who utterly and righteously reject institutional racism, patriarchy and financial elitism in America, and second of those who are now building momentum to engage in a frontal assault against corporate and military pollution in this country and the world, pollution that causes disease, social disintegration and disastrous climate change with the floods, droughts and pandemics it spawns. Both movements are interdependent; social justice advocates and Green New Dealers agree for the most part on the healthy and compassionate new world they are working to build.
The diagnosis so far is that Biden’s side is on the rise, and Trump’s, with his white male supremacists and tax dodging mega-wealthy parasites, is the boat that hit the iceberg.
Whatever happens this November, equality advocates and climate change opponents will gain in power, now and over the years ahead, and they will tip the scales decisively in their favor eventually. It’s only a matter of time. They are both pent up forces that can’t be stopped by mere lies and BS halitosis alone.
In the meantime, many of us are left with odd questions that have interesting answers: What’s the worst thing that can happen to a power elite in a consumer society? Being stupid enough to create conditions — like pandemics and social uprisings — that stop large numbers of people from consuming at a debt-deepening rate. What’s the worst thing that can happen in a patriarchal, white supremacist society? Full democracy, environmental equality and equal justice under law.
What’s the worst thing that can happen in an evolutionary playing field of the survival of the fittest? Being mismatched with conditions and failing to adapt, unfit to survive. What is the worst kind of evolutionary mismatches? Spending all your energy preparing to adapt to an illusion and con game, and thus being mismatched to real circumstances that you didn’t prepare for.
These are the kinds of questions that Biden voters are asking themselves and answering with clarity and conviction. These same questions haven’t even crossed the minds of Trumpians. They don’t want their world to change. But it is — hence the prognosis of their scales and pendulum in politics eventually moving toward the ice-cold reality of a Titanic, sinking in their power, influence and long, vainglorious domination of American life. You can’t survive very long when you call reality a hoax and believe fanatically in your own falsehoods and foolishness.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
(Image by The Brave Union)
V.B., this is one of your best and most thought-provoking columns. By the end where you ask what the worst thing is that can happen to a power elite in a consumer society, to the authoritarian owner class in a patriarchal white supremacist society, or on an evolutionary playing field of the survival of the fittest, you make it clear that those forcing such evils upon us are destined to be outmatched by the very conditions they have created. They will fail to adapt and be incapable of life. It is clear that we must change–demand change, make change, vote for change–or the earth itself will rid itself of such a dangerous mob. Meanwhile, those of us who have lived a long time mourn the tragic loss and worry about our grandchildren and great grandchildren who did nothing to foster such destruction.
Agreed, Margaret and thank you V.B.! But beyond a personal stance, are we dealing with an evolutionary/anthropological/sociological phenomenon that sits deep in our limbic system and which our pre-frontal cortex does not yet have the development to overcome? Based on the stoned ape theory, I posit everyone should try some psilocybin and primal fear would go by the wayside.
In Ronald Inglehart’s Cultural Evolution this concept strikes me- and for the sake of being succint, will just quote how it’s laid out in Wikipedia: “Evolutionary modernization theory holds that economic and physical insecurity elicits an authoritarian reflex leading to xenophobia, strong in-group solidarity, authoritarian politics and rigid adherence to traditional cultural norms. Modernization and economic development has led to a degree of security in many countries after World War II where people take survival for granted. This has led to decreasing authoritarianism and the rise of Postmaterialist Values: egalitarian norms, secularization, tolerance of foreigners, gender equality, and tolerance of divorce, homosexuality, and abortion. The existential security and the egalitarian norms that develop under the feeling of security are necessary for democracy to develop. The freedom of choice in postmaterialist societies also leads to improved happiness. Inglehart now sees a backlash in terms of increasing authoritarianism, political populism, and erosion of democracy as a consequence of the decreasing economic security that follows the growing economic inequality.”
Excellent piece, V.B . which I will share with others. Thank you for continuing to shine the light.
I can tell your years of journalism in this article. I for one sent $100 to the democratic party and will try and send another as we get closer to the end. No one can run from America to another country. This devious president has made sure that no county wants us. This president got in because people were tiered of the same old politics they wanted some one who came from the people Thinking they were all good, and we got the worst. I did not vote for him. I voted for Clinton out of fear that he would win. For 2020I wanted Kamala Harris for president and her as VP will work just fine with me.
A brilliant and trenchant piece that lays out the grounds of our suffering and hopes for whatever future there may be.
Yes I agree, a brilliant summary of ‘the pendulum swinging’. VB I so hope your right that Trump’s Titanic and its gang of thieves will go down by a flurry of votes he or no one can deny. Your analysis is encouraging and worrisome.
Keep’em coming.